Posted
by
Soulskill
on Thursday November 25, 2010 @05:22PM
from the dell's-picard-to-sony's-kirk dept.

Crytek co-founder Cevat Yerli spoke recently about the growing gap between modern PCs and consoles like the PS3 and Xbox 360, saying that the desire to develop for multiple platforms is hampering creative expression. "PC is easily a generation ahead right now. With 360 and PS3, we believe the quality of the games beyond Crysis 2 and other CryEngine developments will be pretty much limited to what their creative expressions is, what the content is. You won't be able to squeeze more juice from these rocks." One reason this trend persists is because of the perception that PC game sales are not high enough for most developers to focus on that platform. Rock, Paper, Shotgun says this indicates a need for the disclosure of digital distribution sales numbers, which could dispel that myth. Yerli's comments come alongside news of Crytek's announcement of a new military-based shooter called Warface.

PC games are written by people who could not code on embedded machines if their life depended on it.

You mean some PC games are written by sloppy coders. Some other PC games are written by people with experience coding for 8-bit microprocessors. Still others are written by people who specialize in PC only due to console makers' institutionalized discrimination against small businesses.

I invite you to look at Shadow of the Colossus. HDR, fur shader, fairy shader, DoF, very nice looking motion blur, IK, and much more flashy effects, on a 200Mhz MIPS machine with 32MB of ram, complete with data streaming. That, and the game is considered to a goddam piece of art if there was ever a game that was worthy of calling art.

I haven't seen anything innovative done on a PC that couldn't have been done on a PS2.

So you think graphics are completely irrelevant, good for you. I'm as much of a fan of gameplay innovation as anyone - I still play a lot of DOS games, in fact - but outstanding graphics DO add something, and there's no question that the PC has a lot more potential than current-gen consoles, let alone a PS2.

Um, no. That may be true now, but that's a fairly recent change. It wasn't that long ago that new games targeted bleeding edge hardware at the time of release. I think roughly the release of Half-life 2 & Doom 3 were the turning point. That's the last time I remember people planning a hardware upgrade specifically to coincide with a game purchase.

I see you've never head of pathfinding AI. Hundreds of units moving around, all having to figure out where they want to go over a gigantic map with different speed values for every tile of terrain. Having to do that can make almost any processing unit shake in sheer terror. Not something console FPS games have to deal with.

That's a recent thing and is OPs point. You most certainly couldn't certain play games on a 3 year old system back in the mid-late 90's for example.

eg. Unreal 1 was released 22nd May 1998. It required a 166Mhz CPU at minimum. Less than 3 years before that the top of the line CPU would have been the Pentium 120 (released 27th May 1995). So you could have bought a top of the line CPU and in less than 3 years it'd be below minimum requirements for the newest games. That sort of thing was normal in that era. It doesn't happen today though.

The majority of developers are going to make their games cross-platform to maximize sales. Without anything to differentiate it, the PS3 and 360 just get the same games (with a very limited number of exclusives).

That said, speaking as a developer for both platforms, you're massively overstating the performance of both consoles there. The PS3 has around 200 GFLOPS of cpu performance, the 360 has around 100. Theoretically, if every single CPU instruction is a multiply-add (hahahahaha). In practice, the PS3 is very hard to program for because you have to shift everything to SPU programs to get any performance out of it at all, and the 360 will run ordinary multi-threaded code, so it evens out. Graphics-wise, the PS3 has around 200 GFLOPS of shader power (note that this only totals 400 GFLOPS, not 2 TFLOPS. Sony did a slide claiming 2 TFLOPS once, they were including texture samplers or something, not only programmable FLOPS), and the 360 has about 240 GFLOPS of shader power.Overall that's 400 GFLOPS for PS3 and 340 GFLOPS for 360. They're actually quite close.

Crytek has a lot of stuff in their CryEngine that actually maps subtle tricks common to film making into realtime graphics. That includes things like advanced (and - if wanted - not so physically correct, but "more realistic") lighting, custom tone mapping for the end result and lots of other stuff.

All of this is at its core a technical advancement in real-time graphics, but they map it in such a way that artists can wield that technology in their ways to create style and mood in their scenes. Want the scene to be in warmer or cooler colors or in sepia/black and white/whatever? Fine, export a screenshot from the level editor to Photoshop, tweak colors with the familiar tools you have in there, reimport it and the engine then analyzes your tweaks and renders the whole scene in that tone. Want to have a very specific, complex lighting setup with, say, special lighting for specific objects (which is also done a bit in live-action movies, btw...), the editor will allow you to do that.

Used properly, tools like that help shaping the mood of a scene subtly. It's the stuff that gets to you subconsciously without you being able to really point it out. In other words: although it sounds like pure tech for tech's sake, it's actually a better toolbox for artistic expression.

Actually, I'm mildly surprised that the stuff that CryEngine 3 does runs as smoothly on consoles as it obviously does.